“I read good. I was an English major.”

Preachers at black churches are the last people left in the English-speaking world who know the schemes and tropes of classical rhetoric: parallelism, antithesis, epistrophe, synecdoche, metonymy, periphrasis, litotes – the whole bag of tricks.

The divorce rate in 1946 was higher than it ever had been and as high as it ever would be until the ’70s. The reason was that prior relationships had not endured the strain of war.

Everybody knows how to raise children, except the people who have them.

Teasing and a sense of humor, if you can develop that in your kids, and if you can exercise it with the kids, just makes for a pleasanter atmosphere.

No humorist is under any obligation to provide answers and probably if you were to delve into the literary history of humour it’s probably all about not providing answers because the humorist essentially says: this is the way things are.

Each child is biologically required to have a mother. Fatherhood is a well-regarded theory, but motherhood is a fact.

Little islands of human happiness, peace, and prosperity are so exceptional at this point in history that I’m not even sure we can draw lessons from them.

What Alexander Graham Bell thought up occupied less space than a flower vase. Now it’s so small that I have to search all my pockets to discover I’ve received a spam text.

No industry in living memory has collapsed faster than daily print journalism.

Cleanliness becomes more important when godliness is unlikely.

I had always thought of Egypt as a rather secular country. And I think it is, but people are quite observant of the strictures of Ramadan.

All change is bad. But sometimes it has to be done.

I’m too tough and sensitive to have to have some pubescent twerp with his mom’s earring in his tongue, who combs his hair with Redi-Whip and has an Ani DiFranco tattoo on his shin, come show me how a computer works.

Rich people don’t like to be in the military. The shoes are ugly and the uniforms itch. Rich people don’t go in much for revolution or terrorism, either.

Fiscal conservatism is just an easy way to express something that is a bit more difficult, which is that the size and scope of government, and really the size and scope of politics in our lives, has grown uncomfortable, unwieldy, intrusive and inefficient.

Term limits aren’t enough. We need jail.

English was my favorite subject.

When I think about literature, I think about it in the three languages I read easily – English, Spanish, and Portuguese.

English offers both obscurity and dark or darkness, and some translators will tell you the Latinate word is generally reserved for poetic and figurative expressions, while the Germanic word is used for colloquial and idiomatic use.

That any troubles are simple misunderstandings, consequent on your not yet having spoken English loudly enough.

Gore speaks to America as if English is its second language; George W. speaks as if English is his second language.

A butler in an English household should, however, be English, and as much like an archbishop as possible.

I think that phrase is the most horrible phrase in the English language – ‘I don’t know.’ It’s terribly embarrassing.

I like English, and I like writing essays, and that kind of stuff.